All Things Product with Teresa and Petra

What if the ideas you throw away tell you more about the health of your product process than the ones you ship?

In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille introduces trash can tracking — a deceptively simple technique for making discovery work visible. By adding trash can symbols across your discovery and delivery boards, teams can see (and celebrate) the customer problems and solutions they deliberately choose not to pursue.

Petra and Teresa dig into what an empty problem-space trash can versus an empty solution-space trash can each signals about your team's innovation, strategy, and discovery culture. Along the way they wrestle with the "golden trash can," the hidden cost of solving every customer problem that lands on your plate, and how psychological safety shapes which problems ever surface in the first place.

Whether your trash cans are overflowing or suspiciously empty, this conversation will change how you think about the work you decide to walk away from.

Everyone's saying it: "Now that AI makes delivery free…" But is it? In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres pull apart one of the most repeated claims in product right now.

They dig into why building a single feature has gotten dramatically cheaper — while building a real, production-quality product has not. Teresa breaks down what happens when teams treat coding agents as "free": spaghetti code, Frankenstein data models, feature bloat, and the maintenance nightmare waiting three weeks down the road. Along the way, they unpack the crucial difference between build to learn and build to earn, why the last 30% of a product is where the real work lives, and why AI products (not just AI-assisted code) are far harder to ship than the demos make them look.

If you've been tempted by the "delivery is free, taste/discovery is all that matters" narrative, this conversation is your reality check. Delivery got cheaper. It did not get free — and it never will.

Conflict on a product team isn't a warning sign — the absence of it usually is.

In this episode of All Things Product, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres tackle a question Teresa hears constantly: what should a product trio do when collaboration breaks down and disagreement turns into friction?

Petra makes the case for something many teams quietly abandoned — the retrospective — and argues that facilitation is a genuine, learnable skill that product people should invest in, not outsource by default. Teresa introduces a framework from academic research on team dynamics: the distinction between task conflict (we disagree on how to do the work) and relationship conflict (something about how we work together puts us at odds). The two require completely different responses, and confusing them is where teams get stuck.

Together they get practical about team charters, when to bring in a neutral third party, how to choose that person, joint escalations, and why running an experiment often beats arguing over opinions.

If your trio is avoiding hard conversations — or having the same one on repeat — this one's for you.

You've got behavioral analytics, support tickets, sales call notes, and a feedback inbox that never empties. With all that data coming in, do product teams actually still need to go out and talk to users?

In this episode, Petra Wille and Teresa Torres dig into why not all product evidence is created equal — and why the type of data you collect matters just as much as the volume. Teresa introduces her "ladder of evidence" framework and shares what she's learning from real interview transcripts through her work at Vistaly: that many teams are confusing product demos, stakeholder meetings, and opinion-gathering sessions for genuine customer research.

They explore the spectrum from low-quality signals (support tickets, app store reviews) to rich, story-based interviews — and why the goal isn't perfection, but moving in the right direction. Plus: why even a mediocre interview is better than no interview at all, and how to coach teams toward stronger evidence without discouraging them from talking to customers in the first place.

Every product manager wants to move into leadership — but nobody wants to hire a leader without leadership experience. So how do you break the cycle?

In this episode, Teresa and Petra unpack the practical, often-overlooked ways individual contributors can build real leadership skills right now, without waiting for a title change. Petra shares a surprisingly simple starting point: understand what your organization actually expects from its leaders, then begin deliberately practicing those behaviors in your current role.

The conversation goes deep on two of the most foundational leadership skills — the art of saying no with evidence and clarity, and the ability to provide directional clarity at increasing time horizons. Whether you're setting direction for a sprint today or hoping to own product strategy someday, this episode gives you a clear path to get there.